Author, keynote speaker, and customer experience consultant. Expert in customer service, the customer experience, customer centricity, hospitality, and building a customer-centric corporate culture. My most recently published title is "High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service." I'm an entrepreneur myself with a background in manufacturing, entertainment, marketing. I'm based in metro Seattle when not traveling. Reach me at 484-343-5881 or micah@micahsolomon.com

The Customer Service Habit: Why Your Company Culture Needs To Catch It

Want to deliver customer service so good it knocks your competition out of the running? If so, you can’t leave it to happenstance. Extraordinary customer service comes from building an organizational, cultural habit: making sure great customer service feels like the norm, the expectation in your company culture, rather than an exception, a fluke.

Habit is the customer service secret that many otherwise successful organizations are missing. It’s necessary if you want to get beyond offering a pretty good level of customer service, some of the time, to offering a reliably high level of customer service almost all the time. And that’s what this article is about.

But first I have a true confession. (Don’t get too excited; it has to do with seat belts.)

Today, I didn’t use my safety belt. For about 11 seconds. I was turning my Volvo (yes) around in my driveway and consciously thought to myself, as I put the key in the ignition, “I’m going to live on the edge. I’m just in my own driveway, and it’s just for a moment.”

Let me tell you. Those 11 seconds were uncomfortable. Panicky. A poison ivy level of personal discomfort. Halfway into the maneuver, I had to break down and belt myself in after all, in order to feel all right.

Why? Because when we were kids my parents, bless them, never ever allowed a key to turn in an ignition until everyone in the car was strapped in. Didn’t matter if it was our car, a rental, a taxi, or one of those little shuttle buses. So doing the right thing in the area of safety isn’t something I get to be proud of. It’s something I can’t help doing.

(Classic Volvo print ad)

Onward to customer service. Any employee, and I mean any, can rise to giving good service once in a while: Perhaps when it’s really slow, when the employee really clicks with a particular customer, when the employee is especially well rested and especially un-hungover.

But great customer service, the kind that over time makes your competition entirely irrelevant to your customers, has to happen day in and day out, and with customers who have funky attitudes, who don’t treat you like you’d prefer to be treated, who interrupt you when you are trying to make sense of conflicting priorities on very little sleep.

This is where my seatbelt theorem comes into play. Your organization needs to ooze habitual (habitually ooze?) customer service excellence. Not “some of the time, it’s OK if we do, OK if we don’t” customer service, but true customer service excellence.

While this depends first, of course, on hiring people who are appropriate to customer service, to customer facing positions (See my WETCO hiring criteria that will help you greatly in this area), and then depends on you to train and inspire employees to give extraordinary service, it depends, in the long run, on developing habit. On employees building up the habit of great customer service, by observing their leaders in the act, and by working side by side with great peers who consistently deliver great service, day in and day out. Doing it to the point that, for example, being abrupt with a guest or not helping a customer in obvious need (she’s looking at a map, for example, but you don’t offer to help her get where they’re going), feels awkward, itchy, squirm-inducing.

If you’re lucky, these habits start long before the employee was even hired: they learned them, as I learned the seatbelt habit, from their parents. But you can’t count on that. So, as a leader, generate and reinforce the right habits by:

• Always–always–insisting employees provide the very best service: not “minimum daily requirement” service, not inoffensive service, but the best service.

• Modeling the highest level of customer service yourself as a manager.

• Surrounding your employees with only great employees, for positive peer pressure that makes it even more impossible to do things wrong. (This is why it’s sometimes better to leave a position temporarily unfilled rather than to hire someone for it who isn’t up to your organization’s level of commitment to customer service standards.)

This is the way to give extraordinary service, consistently, day in and day out, in good times and bad, easy circumstances and hard.

But here’s the problem: Sadly, habit also works in reverse. Even if you hire as carefully as possible, and train as hard as the dickens, if your employees see, at work, that an attitude of “we’re doing the customer a favor,” or “we’ll do as little as seems reasonable to avoid going out of our way,” is tolerated, that will become the habit. And it’s a hard, hard one to dig out once its roots get dug in.

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, company culture speaker, and author.

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Micah, You are absolutely right! The key to building a reputation for delivering exceptional service is simply delivering it consistently. But how? Samuel Johnson said, “People need to me reminded more than they need to be instructed.” So how do managers consistently remind their direct reports of the importance of customer service. Your PEPI Method certainly works to keep everyone focused. But I’ll let you elaborate. Thanks again for this reminder about the value of delivering consistent customer service.

I love your Samuel Johnson quote. (Bill is a GM for Marriott, and indisputably knows more about habitually providing great service than most.) PEPI: So PEPI is my acronymmy way to uphold and energize your customer service standards: (I pronounce it “peppy,” but you’re on the honor system here.)

Purpose: Inspire employees with a clear sense of the purpose of their organization, and their purpose in the organization—and help them grow their understanding of how your service standards support these. Enforce intelligently: Keep things simple, keep them visual, and reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. Peer pressure: Positive peer pressure is a must. Input: Employees are able to have a say in the refinements, changes, and even possible future abolition of the standard.

I never thought of it this way. This is a good thing to realize especially for people who are at the top of the business’ ladder.

Indeed, if you live, breathe, and eat customer service within yourselves, it’ll be easier to apply that when there are real customers around. It’ll be a culture and culture isn’t easy to remove from one’s system.

Thank you for writing, John. It’s hard when the boss doesn’t walk the walk, and it’s hard when some of your peers don’t walk the walk. It’s also hard if you yourself don’t have experience walking the walk, but while time can cure that one, it only will cure it if good practices aren’t interrupted by too many negative exceptions–permitted or observed.

Thanks for the article Micah! Once again a great read. Your comments on peer pressure are spot on. I’ve seen good managers fail many times because there was a bad peer pressure dynamic in the company. It sometimes takes one employee to mess up a whole system. I agree with the fact that you can’t really let small details go. If someone starts providing bad service (even once) they will need to be reminded that this can’t happen or it might become a habit.

Seeing companies like Zappos, I think that good peer pressure is also built around a strong positive company culture that everyone adopted. There’s no easy path to outstanding service but making sure the work environment is as enjoyable as possible is a great first step toward success.